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Archive for the ‘pause’ Category

Has the media been trying to bury bad news here? Embarrassingly bad news for its enthusiasm for supposed man-made global warming, that is.

Last week a team of researchers from the UK Met Office, the University of East Anglia, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Southern Queensland and the Sorbonne published in the journal Science Advances an interesting paper showing that the recent much debated and researched 21st century “slowdown” in global surface temperatures was real and could be explained by reduced solar activity and increased volcanic counteracting climate forcing from greenhouse gases.

An obvious problem with studies like this is that as soon as natural climate variation is invoked – to explain the lack of expected warming from so-called greenhouse gases – the argument that such gases could be a dominant factor in climate processes is then severely weakened to say the least. It is in effect an admission that such variations could cause warming as well as cooling. How long can a ‘hiatus’ last before it becomes the status quo?

Reinforcement of Climate Hiatus by Decadal Modulation of Daily Cloud Cycle
– By Jun Yin and Amilcare Porporato, Princeton University
H/T The GWPF

Based on observations and climate model results, it has been suggested that the recent slowdown of global warming trends (climate hiatus), which took place in the early 2000s, might be due to enhanced ocean heat uptake.

Here we suggest an alternative hypothesis which, at least in part, would relate such slowdown to unaccounted energy reflected or re-emitted by clouds.

‘Reports of the death of the global warming pause have been greatly exaggerated’, says David Whitehouse at The GWPF. If temperatures really were climbing would anyone bother with this sort of ‘science’?

A new paper in Nature Climate Change concludes that the so-called pause in global surface temperatures never happened. The paper has been mentioned in a few media outlets.

It claims that new data from the Arctic makes the pause go away – and so it seems until you look at the paper in a little more detail than news headlines suggest.

ABSTRACT The period from 2000 to 2016 shows a modest warming trend that the advocates of the anthropogenic global warming theory have labeled as the “pause” or “hiatus.” These labels were chosen to indicate that the observed temperature standstill period results from an unforced internal fluctuation of the climate (e.g. by heat uptake of the deep ocean) that the computer climate models are claimed to occasionally reproduce without contradicting the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGWT) paradigm.

In part 1 of this work, it was shown that the statistical analysis rejects such labels with a 95% confidence because the standstill period has lasted more than the 15 year period limit provided by the AGWT advocates themselves. Anyhow, the strong warming peak observed in 2015-2016, the “hottest year on record,” gave the impression that the temperature standstill stopped in 2014. Herein, the authors show that such a temperature peak is unrelated to anthropogenic forcing: it simply emerged from the natural fast fluctuations of the climate associated to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon.

They could perhaps have taken more notice of this paper by Spencer and Braswell six years ago, which found that Earth’s atmosphere is more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”
H/T The GWPF.

As egg-on-face moments go, it was a double-yolker, writes Nigel Hawkes in The Sunday Times [restricted access].

Last week a group of climate scientists published a paper that admitted the estimates of global warming used for years to torture the world’s conscience and justify massive spending on non-carbon energy sources were, er, wrong.

The admission was overdue acknowledgment of something that has been obvious for years.

GWPF Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse takes a close look at some recent developments in the long-running global temperature ‘pause’ controversy.

A new paper has been published in the Analysis section of Nature called Reconciling controversies about the ‘global warming hiatus.’ It confirms that the ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause’ is real. It is also rather revealing.

It attempts to explain the ‘Pause’ by looking into what is known about climate variability. They say that four years after the release of the IPCC AR5 report, which contained much about the ‘hiatus’ it is time to see what can be learned.

One could be a little sarcastic in saying why would Nature devote seven of its desirable pages to an event that some vehemently say never existed and maintain its existence has been disproved long ago.

Now, however, as the El Nino spike of the past few years levels off, analysing the ‘pause’ seems to be coming back into fashion.

The reality of a global temperature ‘standstill’ was accepted as fact by fervent warmist James Hansen in a paper over four years ago, but is still controversial to some people.
H/T GWPF

Despite widespread denial among climate activists, a growing number of scientific research papers in recent months have confirmed the global warming hiatus, trying to explain its possible reasons (for the latest studies see GWPF links here).

The latest study claims that the Southern Ocean played a critical role in the global warming slowdown.(more…)

They admit the hiatus, or pause, is still a puzzle: ‘processes remain unclear’. What is clear is that the observed temperature trend in the study period is unlike the carbon dioxide trend.

The increasing rate of the global mean surface temperature was reduced from 1998 to 2013, known as the global warming hiatus, or pause.

Researchers have devoted much effort to the understanding of the cause, reports Phys.org. The proposed mechanisms include the internal variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, ocean heat uptake and redistribution, and many others.

However, scientists also want to understand the atmospheric footprint of the recent warming hiatus as the dynamical and physical processes remain unclear.(more…)

It should be harder for NOAA to brush this off than it was when the last President was in office.
H/T GWPF

Revelations by the Mail on Sunday about how world leaders were misled over global warming by the main source of climate data have triggered a probe by the US Congress.

Republican Lamar Smith, who chairs the influential House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, announced the inquiry last week in a letter to Benjamin Friedman, acting chief of the organisation at the heart of the MoS disclosures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He renewed demands, first made in 2015, for all internal NOAA documents and communications between staff behind a controversial scientific paper, which made a huge impact on the Paris Agreement on climate change of that year, signed by figures including David Cameron and Barack Obama.(more…)

The arguments stirred up by the NOAA’s ‘pausegate’ whistleblower rumble on. A UK Met Office expert asserted ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away’. This one could run and run.

David Rose’s splendid and significant article in last week’s Mail on Sunday certainly caused a stir. The initial reaction, mostly distractions, have been easily dealt with by David Rose in this week’s installment.

One of the points raised concerned a paper submitted to the Journal of Climate by Huang et al. It is about the new ERSSTv5 sea surface temperature dataset.

It is an interesting paper that claims that ERSSTv5 shows a lower rate of warming than the previous ERSSTv4 which was used by the now famous Karl et al paper in 2015 which claimed that — contrary to the IPCC — there had been no slowdown in the rate of temperature increase in the past 15 years or so – the so-called Pause.

One persistent activist said the paper was stolen and it was unethical to comment on it. In reality the preprint was obtained from a public webpage, anyone could have downloaded it. It has been in circulation for weeks.(more…)

Climate scientist Ed Hawkins comments on the paper of which he is one of the co-authors. Others include Ben Santer and Michael Mann.

It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming ‘slowdown’ or ‘hiatus’, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented in a new commentary in Nature Climate Change by Fyfe et al. contradicts these claims.(more…)

Time for the NOAA to front up and explain to US public representatives how it came up with its own temperature data that ran counter to everyone else’s, as GWPF reports.

Scientists and top officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have agreed to start interviews akin to depositions this week with House investigators, who are demanding to know their internal deliberations on a groundbreaking climate change study.

But the interviews may not be enough to placate the chairman of the House science committee, a global warming skeptic who last week stepped up the pressure on the Commerce Department to comply with his subpoena for e-mails that NOAA has refused to turn over.

If temperatures won’t go up, bring the so-called ‘target’ down. That’s the latest brainwave of climate fear merchants, seemingly oblivious to the lack of any temperature rise this century.

Former Guardian writer Fred Pearce reports:
Is the world’s target of limiting global warming to 2 °C too high, or too low? Does it even make scientific sense? The consensus around the target, which was agreed at climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, seems to be coming unstuck.

Back in October, US climate analysts David Victor and Charles Kennel called it scientifically meaningless and politically unachievable. We should get used to the idea of something warmer, they said.

Now the target has been denounced as “utterly inadequate”, by Petra Tschakert of Penn State University in University Park, who has been involved in a UN review of the target. She wants a 1.5 °C target instead. Writing in the journal Climate Change Responses, she says this lower limit is necessary if we want sea levels to rise less than a metre, to protect half of all coral reefs, and to still have some ice during Arctic summers.

The Guardian newspaper finally facing up to climate reality? Well, after a fashion. Their global warming can may have been kicked down the road for a while, that’s all.

The idea that natural variation could make temperatures go up as well as down is still not for discussion in their biased climate world.

H/T Lord Beaverbrook.

Guardian report: Manmade global warming over the past decade has probably been partly offset by the cooling effect of natural variability in the Earth’s climate system, a team of climate researchers have concluded.

The finding could help explain the slowdown in temperature rises this century that climate sceptics have seized on as evidence climate change has stopped, even though 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have happened since 2000.

The authors of the new paper describe the slowdown, sometimes called a global warming hiatus or pause, as a “false pause”. They warn that the natural cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic that they found are currently having an overall cooling effect on temperatures will reverse in the coming decades – at which point warming will accelerate again.

But then most of us aren’t “climate scientists”, who have once again granted themselves permission to assemble a cavalcade of conjecture and omission and parade it as “evidence”, courtesy of the Australian Academy of Science. They do, however, care deeply about puppies and kittens

The Australian Academy of Science has hitched its wagon to the “climate change will kill kittens and puppies” school of science. This kittens-and-puppies theme was dreamed up by Harvard University’s Naomi Oreskes and endorsed by Academician and ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams — a device quite deliberately intended to make householders sit up, take notice and believe in the scariness of computer-model forecasts.